


If A Door Be Closed

by stars_inthe_sky



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Case Fic, Clint Feels, F/M, Gen, Hawkingbird, Inspired by a Movie, Karaoke, Post-Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Relationship Issues, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, once - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-27 08:19:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5041015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stars_inthe_sky/pseuds/stars_inthe_sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I don’t know you, but I want you all the more for that.</i> Falling slowly, two kindred spirits bond over an unusual case, coffee, karaoke, a lot of junk food, and whatever that spark in the air is. But the world is bigger than the two of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If A Door Be Closed

She’s twirling her batons again. It’s a habit picked up from her days at the Academy, back when she was still trying to study both biochemistry and combat full-time. The mindless motion helps her think, and thinking’s what she needs to do just now, if she’s going to make any sense of this case.

Her shoulder has healed enough that it only hurts when it’s humid or she works it too hard, but Bobbi’s once-mangled leg is still sensitive, the muscles straining and throbbing whenever she shifts too much weight onto it. The recurring pain taps into her apparently brimming well of hate and anger, which is the other reason she’s got her batons in hand—so she can whirl around to hit the punching bag hanging in the middle of the room whenever the mood moves her.

It’s not the best coping mechanism, physically or mentally, but it beats actual therapy either way.

Wrapped up in her thoughts and too used to the solitude of the last few weeks, she doesn’t hear the door to the training room opening, or even notice that she has company until a male voice asks, “Ex or enemy?”

Bobbi whips an eskrima stick at the intruder without thinking; it hits him solidly against the neck, but he catches it on the rebound and slings it back at her even as he coughs for breath. She snatches it in midair and moves to strike him, but he raises both hands in the air in surrender. “I—I think we’re on the same team here. Clint Barton. I—I’m an Avenger? You’re with S.H.I.E.L.D., I hope?”

She peers at him, batons still raised, and realizes that he does look familiar. She’s seen plenty of pictures of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top (well, only) archer-turned-superhero, but apparently the world’s camera crews haven’t been doing him justice; he’s better-looking and more muscled in person—although not standing next to the likes of Thor probably helps. He’s taller than she’d expected, too, which is probably also related to not standing next to Thor.

The mess that mangled Bobbi’s body a few months ago, however, is a harsh reminder that people aren’t always who they appear to be. And though she’s longed for company since she arrived at this not-quite-suburban safe house, she’s not about to trust everybody who walks through the door. “Prove it,” she says.

Barton blinks several times and absently wiggles his fingers, which are still dangling in midair. “Harmony.”

“What?” Bobbi concedes to standing down at that, albeit with her sticks still in hand, back to twirling.

“That’s the name of this safe house, right? I remember when Coulson set it up a few years back. He was seeing that cellist and everything was music metaphors. Figured it’d be empty—he wasn’t telling too many people about it. I needed somewhere to crash for a few days, and it sounded from Hill like S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t quite have the resources to maintain this place anymore.”

Bobbi relaxes—his details match Coulson’s description—and transfers the batons to her left hand, offering the right to him. “Barbara Morse.”

“Oh, _you’re_ the famous Mockingbird!” Barton drops his arms and shakes her hand eagerly. “I’ve heard _stories_. Always thought we should meet—birds of a feather, right?”

She rolls her eyes good-naturedly at the joke. “I was under the impression that S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers aren’t really flocking together at the moment, though. And I’m still with S.H.I.E.L.D., so I gotta ask—doesn’t Avengers membership come with a bed all to yourself and a fully-stocked bar in that fancy Stark monolith?”

Barton winces. “Well, technically— _technically_ , I’m off the team roster for the moment. By choice. Honest. But yeah…look, I don’t know if you’ve ever met Tony or his people, but there are times when that’s just not who you need to be around, you know?”

“I get that,” she nods. “If you wanted to be alone, though, I’m here for another week or so at least. Mandatory medical leave. Long story, but I can keep out of your way with…whatever you’re here for. I’ve got a couple of my own balls in the air, though I’m sure Coulson would have wanted you to be comfortable and all.”

“Relax. I know he’s alive,” Barton says. “Fury told us a while back.” He wanders around her to steady the gently swaying punching bag. “So, medical leave?”

Bobbi shrugs. “Dealing with Hydra isn’t all exploding Triskelions and magic scepters. The day-to-day gets pretty nasty, it turns out.” He follows her pointed gaze to the surgical scars crisscrossing her knee under its brace, starting just below the hem of her shorts and radiating halfway down her shin. Some of the bruising is still almost as purple as his t-shirt.

“Sorry to hear that.” Barton returns to the foyer, where his faded gray duffel bag and what she assumes is a very high-tech bow and quiver are sitting.

“I’ve got the ground-level bedroom staked out, but the one upstairs is yours if you want it,” Bobbi says, trying to sound a little kinder. His company isn’t unwelcome, and the Avengers weren’t the ones who’d stuck her here, though reminding herself of that makes her swing both sticks at the punching bag. The motion tugs uncomfortably at her shoulder muscles. “My shit’s kind of everywhere, but you can just kick whatever out of the way…as long as you don’t mess with my paperwork. I’ll get that cleaned up when I’m done in here, I guess.”

“Ah, S.H.I.E.L.D. No matter how long you spend laid up with injuries that would kill a lesser human, there’s still a form to fill out,” Barton muses, a little fondly, as he gathers his things. She doesn’t correct his assumption.

***

When Bobbi finally forces herself out of the training room, it’s because she’s worked her leg hard enough that she can barely kick without stabbing pain, and the tense, repetitive movements with her eskrima sticks have left her palms tender and ready to blister. Her usual callouses had faded while she was laid up and recovering, and it isn’t worth slicing her hands open just because she’s angry about an unsolved case she shouldn’t even be investigating—to say nothing of ex-husbands and Hydra trash.

She limps toward the kitchen, planning to ignore the unholy mess of business records, scribbled-on street maps, and handwritten notes that dominates the table at least until she’s showered. The stocky archer leaning over her piles of notes and evidence puts a wrench in that, though, and he looks up when she enters the room. “So, medical leave, huh?”

Bobbi rummages in the freezer for an ice pack, then props her bad leg on an empty chair and settles down. She sighs with relief as the chill works its way under her skin. “I got bored.”

Barton grins. “Fair enough. You working a case, then?” He squints at one of the maps.

Bobbi gestures helplessly. “Not…officially. But I kind of stumbled onto a thing and I was curious. Mostly I’ve been bored out of my fucking _mind_ stuck here for weeks, and trying to figure out who’s running a counterfeit currency ring in _this_ neighborhood, of all places, is better than nothing.”

“Fake money?” He sounds more interested than even the police had, and it occurs to her that maybe he could be looking for legitimate distraction here as much as she’s been. “Doesn’t really sound like a S.H.I.E.L.D. gig…but now I’m kinda curious, too. This area isn’t exactly a hotbed of commerce and commodities.”

“Exactly,” she says, suddenly more excited than she cares to admit at the possibility of discussing this with _anyone_ besides the uninterested officers at the neighborhood precinct. “They seem to be getting it into circulation in really small amounts—spending a few bucks at the 7-11 here, a twenty at the bodega there, a ten at Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s smart, because it makes the whole thing really hard to trace, but it all seems to be coming from the same handful of businesses…and no one’s talking except the customers who find out they’ve got counterfeit money in their change. And the police can’t be bothered, naturally.”

“Maybe someone’s paying those merchants off to circulate the bad bills?” Barton suggests. “Dunno what the point of that would be. But these records you’ve got, they’re not showing any extreme losses or gains, so if they’re only putting in a little at a time and using the bribe to offset losses…it’d be a really easy way to get it into circulation. Like, it looks like your 7-11 and your bodega and your Dunkin’ could be coming up with extra money to level the books…not a lot of it, so it’s hard to spot, but if it _is_ fake…”

“Well, exactly. Someone’s handing them fake cash and managed to convince everybody to use it and keep on using it.” She hands him a photocopy where she’s circled the suspicious numbers. “I called the police the first time I got bad change, but they never even filed the incident, and when I went back to the convenience store, the guy behind the counter played dumb…but he was a shitty actor. Mostly, he just looked totally terrified, but that can’t have been because of the police. Everything else is anecdotal from hearing people mutter around the neighborhood, or…well, if anyone asks, S.H.I.E.L.D. has a classified interest in these dealings, so there were, uh, tax records that needed requisitioning. If anyone asks.”

“Okay,” Barton says. “So, somebody puts the fear of God into, what, half a dozen local business owners? Convinces them to take fake money. Fucks over random blue-collar customers in the neighborhood in the process by sticking them with the evidence— _dick_ move, by the way—and the police are either part of the scheme or paid off or intimidated, too.”

Bobbi nods, warming to him as he makes it clear that she really does have a case in front of her. “Yep. But, like I said, nobody’s talking. And the counterfeit cash moves quickly, because it’s in such small denominations, so I can’t prove it’s big enough to bring to, say, the feds. And I’m technically on leave, so I can’t bug any active S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. And, let’s face it, they have bigger fish to fry than this.”

“Well, that…sucks. Dead ends are the worst.”

“Don’t I know it.” She leans back in her chair and decides she likes her new housemate. “Any interest in dinner? There’s a great Chinese place down the street that I know takes credit cards.”

***

They’re the only people in the mostly-takeout restaurant, but Bobbi decides she’s too hungry to wait. With plastic utensils and splintery chopsticks, they dig into the shared boxes of dumplings, rolls, rice, and something labeled “Winter Hill Kung Fu Chicken” that Barton had insisted they take a risk on.

Several minutes of chewing go by, and Bobbi takes a break to sip her soda and surreptitiously examine her new friend. He tucks into the meal like he’s worried some of it might vanish, but he eats like someone taught him manners—maybe with the back of their hand, judging by his stiff fingers, but the lessons stuck. Up close, sitting just across from her, he’s got a roughness to his good looks that she hadn’t noticed earlier; his fingers and arms are covered in callouses and small streaks of scar tissue, his nose has been broken and poorly set at least once, and a few gray hairs have sprouted around his temples.

Other than what might be a pair of very compact hearing aids behind his ears, none of that is especially uncommon—not in their line of work—but Bobbi realizes she’d been expecting him to be somehow exempt from aging or injury, like his super-powered friends. She had met Romanoff once on the original Helicarrier, and the woman had skin like a limited-edition Barbie doll. Barton looks as human as anyone else.

He catches her gaze and raises an eyebrow, sucking in a noodle with a pointed slurp. She blushes. “Sorry, kinda zoned out there.”

“Long day of…whatever you call what you were doing with those batons when I came in?”

“Huh? Oh—twirling. Helps me think. I’m almost ready to go back in the field, and I am _gonna_ crack that case before I do, so…what?”

He’s grinning, a cheeky sort of smirk that reaches his eyes. “Twirling?”

“Don’t make fun,” Bobbi says, reaching across the table to poke him with her chopstick. “There are worse, like…fidgety habits.”

“No, no, it’s—” he leans sideways, digging into his pocket to withdraw a small crossbow bolt. “Birds of a feather.” He twists the bolt between his fingers, flipping it from hand to hand with flicks of his thumb as it picks up speed. “Hardly ever use a crossbow, but I almost always hang onto one of these.”

She laughs. “Nice. Where’d you learn the tricks? I got a couple from the marching band in high school, but…”

“Ran away and joined the circus,” Barton says with a cheeky smirk. Bobbi snorts, but before she can say anything else, he snatches his stick out of the air and leans toward her, the mirth ebbing from his features. “Morse, anybody know you’ve been looking into this whole phony money thing?”

“Probably, why?”

“We should go,” he says, nodding toward the entrance of the restaurant.

Bobbi turns and reaches for the floor, on the pretense of retrieving a fallen soy sauce packet, and she sees the guy who had been mopping the floor a minute ago talking with a pair of rough-looking middle-aged men, both in reddish tracksuits. “Shit. Kitchen?”

“Kitchen.”

They both rise, sweeping the remains of the meal onto the pair of plastic trays they’d been issued and heading for the counter, which is clear enough to slide across without making much of a mess. The woman behind it starts to protest, but they brush past her, making a beeline for the back door and picking up speed as soon as they’re spotted.

Bobbi twists the knob and bumps it with her hip as the woman starts yelling in Mandarin. Barton, who had for some reason thought it necessary to hang onto the last spring roll, groans around a mouthful of it and rolls his eyes. He tosses the rest of the food aside, and they burst out of the building into an alley with a textbook two-agent exit formation.

Sure enough, another pair of big, track-suited men is waiting for them, and one of them mutters something that sounds vaguely Slavic as he spots them. Bobbi’s firearms are back at Harmony, and Barton appears equally unprepared, but, in the split second before the fighting begins, he catches her eye and grins.

Bobbi flips the nearest goon over her shoulder when he makes a grab for her. He lands on his back, hard. She follows up the impact with a punch to the gut and a sharp kick to the head with her good leg. He goes limp. She whirls around to see Barton’s target in similar shape. He looks up at her, flushed and grinning, and Bobbi jerks her head to suggest an escape route. Barton nods and, unexpectedly, grabs her hand as they make a run for it.

Adrenaline courses through her for the first time in weeks, and, weaving through mostly-empty streets, it occurs to her that the feeling isn’t just from the short fight.

***

It’s nearly half an hour before they stumble back in the house, panting but in agreement that they’d evaded any tails. They split up to double-check the house’s perimeter, resetting the various alarms, detectors, and tripwires around the building’s deceptively shoddy exterior until they’re both satisfied that Harmony is safe for the night.

“So,” Barton says with a yawn as they head into the house. “Definitely gotta get this case of ours resolved in the AM, huh?”

Bobbi cocks her head. “Oh, it’s _our_ case now?”

“Hey, I sweat and almost bleed and lose half of a perfectly good spring roll for the thing? It’s definitely my case now, too. In the morning, anyway. When I haven’t been traveling half the day and sprinting all night. Besides, it seems like we make a solid pair out there.”

“Fair enough. You’re in.” Bobbi pauses by the door to her bedroom. “You know, it’s been kind of a long day, but if you wanted to…unwind a little…I’d be game.”

“Uh,” Barton breathes, slack-jawed and dazed in a way that’s probably not tiredness. “I’m, you know, flattered, but also, um…well, married.”

Whatever response she had expected, that wasn’t it—he isn’t wearing a ring—and she feels her cheeks burning with embarrassment. “Oh, geez, sorry, I had no idea. I’m just gonna…go…to sleep…in here… yeah.”

Bobbi ducks into her room and closes the door as quickly as she can manage, but Barton doesn’t walk away immediately, and the lack of footsteps gives her pause, too.

***

Bobbi’s aching leg wakes her in the morning, and it takes a few minutes for her head to clear enough to remember the previous day. With a groan, she drags herself to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, more resolute than ever that this case needs solving and sincerely hoping that maybe Clint Barton had left as quietly as he’d arrived. She chugs water and a pair of aspirin, then starts pouring cereal while trying her best to focus on how to take down these anonymous bad guys who probably now know what she looks like.

Barton finds her, cereal bowl in hand, testing her balance on her bad leg while skimming tax records she isn’t technically supposed to have for the hundredth time. “I’ve got an idea.”

She half-chokes on her wheat flakes in surprise—she had assumed that even if he was still around he’d sleep for a couple more hours, since he’d vaguely insinuated the night before that he had come from a different time zone—but recovers quickly. “Morning, Barton.”

“Good morning to you, too,” he says, although he seems even less awake and more disheveled than Bobbi feels. “And honestly, Clint is fine, unless you’re one of those _cool_ agents who last-names _everybody_. Morse.”

She sets her now-empty bowl in the sink and refills her water glass. “Uh, sure. Clint. Most people call me Bobbi. And, look, sorry about last night, I don’t know what I—”

Barton—Clint—waves a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had weirder days and worse propositions from much less interesting or attractive people. And, like I said, I do wanna help with this counterfeiting thing, if you’re cool with an extra pair of eyes and hands.”

He meets her eyes pointedly, and she nods. “Yeah, that’d be great. Always nice to have a partner in the field.”

“Sweet.” He gestures to the pantry questioningly. “Mind if I…?”

“Sure, help yourself. Most of it was here when I got here, and I already chucked whatever was expired.” She rinses out her bowl as the coffee maker dings. Clint perks up at the sound, and she grabs a pair of mugs out of the cabinet. “So, what was your breakthrough idea?”

He leans against the sink, chewing thoughtfully. “Well, at the very least, I figured we can do another pass-by of your local storefronts, or I can, since it seems like they know your face. You said none of the managers are talking—let’s see about the employees. Or spouses.”

“Spouses?” Blowing on her coffee to cool it, Bobbi wanders back to the paper-strewn table and withdraws a list of owners whose businesses have been handing out bad money.

He shrugs and explains through a mouthful of raisins, “Corner stores and franchises like that, a lot of them’re family operations. And even if they aren’t, the spouse usually knows if something’s up, even when they don’t know what. And they probably won’t know who you are, and none of them know me, especially in this context.”

Bobbi takes a deep, delicious gulp of her coffee and considers this. “That’s an angle I hadn’t really thought about…except for the part where you’re recent international news. Remember when a robot was gonna drop a city on Eastern Europe?”

“Surprisingly enough, I do,” Clint retorts, placing his cereal bowl in the sink and pausing to chug most of his coffee without even checking to see if it’s cooled. “Aw, coffee, yes.” He polishes off the rest of the cup and pours more.

“Anyway, I dare you to find one captioned picture of me,” Clint continues. “TV screenshots included. Because I’ve looked, and believe me, it’s all Iron Man and Cap and the big green guy and the alien god with the magic hammer. Maybe Nat, if someone wants to start bitching about the lack of female representation…or the failures of the military-industrial complex…or S.H.I.E.L.D.’s influence on vigilante global security—which are all fair, actually—but, anyway, I’m willing to bet you’ve only heard of me through S.H.I.E.L.D., not CNN. Plus, I’ll be in street clothes, like you are—no one really expects to see somebody from the news in jeans buying churros.”

She has to admit he has a point.

***

Bobbi spends half an hour doing her rehab exercises and stretches before showering and dressing for the day. She thinks she hears Clint upstairs on the phone with someone—his wife, maybe—but it’s too muffled to eavesdrop from her room. In any case, they’re ready around the same time, and after reexamining her collected evidence to make a game plan, they set out.

The first two stops—a liquor store and a 7-11—don’t yield much useful information. Bobbi hasn’t spent much time patronizing either, so none of the employees appear to recognize her, and no one gives Clint a second glance. They stagger their entrances; Bobbi slowly browses the shelves, to be safe, while Clint goes to the counter to complain that he’d been given phony bills in change the previous day. In both cases, the manager of the store is quick to assure him that it was their mistake, and here’s his change in real currency, and please don’t say anything to the police because we’ve got it covered and already fired the cashier responsible and don’t want any trouble.

They leave the 7-11 with a pair of Slurpees, making note of both managers’ names to look into their spouses or other family members later, and recap on a park bench across from the next stop, the Dunkin’ Donuts where Bobbi had first seen the counterfeit money. Clint grumbles as he types the names into the list on his phone, stopping repeatedly as he hits the wrong keys, but he looks up when Bobbi taps him on the shoulder and jerks her head toward the storefront.

In front of the shop, an Indian couple exchanges a peck on the lips as the presumed husband unlocks the front door. They enter the store, and the wife flips a “Back in 15 minutes” sign in the window over to “Open.” Clint gulps down the rest of his Slurpee—then intercepts Bobbi to drink most of what she had been about to throw away—and they make their move.

Clint takes a lap around the block while Bobbi hovers in the back of the store, ostensibly debating what to order and even throwing a couple of questions at the wife, who’s putting another pot of coffee on while her husband has disappeared in the back. After a few minutes, a bell jingles as Clint enters; he and Bobbi trade a brief glance and then both turn to look at the door as the bell jingles again. A teenage girl walks in, dressed in flannel and what probably passes for trendy ripped denim, and Clint lets her by on the pretense of indecision. Bobbi follows her through the short line-maze, yawning to suggest her need for coffee.

The woman behind the counter, whose nametag says Shreya, hands the teenager her doughnut in a paper bag and barely gets the words, “That will be…” out of her mouth before the girl flips an impressive-looking switchblade out and points it at the cashier.

“That’ll be my Boston Kreme, plus whatever you have in the register. Quick, now, I don’t wanna draw blood any more than you do.” Shreya raises her hands in shaky surrender.

Bobbi can feel Clint shifting behind her as they both assess the best way to proceed; there’s no telling how skilled this kid is or isn’t with her knife or if she’s got backup outside. But then, knife still pointed at the cashier, she turns her head to look at both of them and says, “Stay back, don’t talk, and you get your sugar high for free today. Move and I’ll gut you, too.”

Clint sighs mightily. “God, I kinda wish you actually knew what you were doing.”

Bobbi uses the opening his comment gives her to send a hard kick with her good leg into the would-be thief’s waist, knocking her sideways. She stumbles but recovers quickly and swings her knife at Bobbi, who blocks the girl’s wrist with her forearm. Bobbi head-butts her and grabs the knife-wielding arm with her free hand. Clint gets the mugger into a headlock from behind, surprising her. Bobbi easily pries the switchblade out of her fist and snaps the cheap hinge in half barehanded, pocketing the pieces.

“Ma’am, you got any zip-ties back there? Something we can secure her with ‘til the authorities get here?” Clint asks. The woman nods quickly and reaches under the counter, eyes locked on the subdued teenager, who looks more sullen than threatening now. Bobbi retrieves the fistful of plastic, and they have her tied to a chair and to one of the weighted rope-line pylons in a minute. “You should probably call the police,” Clint adds, almost as an afterthought.

Shreya pulls a cell phone out of her pocket and starts to dial, but Bobbi stops her. “Do you mind if we ask you a couple of real quick questions first?” The older woman glances at the tied-up teenager and shrugs, gesturing for Bobbi to go ahead.

“Look, I was in here a week or two ago—I think your husband might’ve been working the counter—and I got back a bunch of counterfeit bills in change…and a few other places on this block have been doing the same thing. Know anything about that?”

“No,” the woman says, too quickly for believability, which she seems to realize as soon as she says it. “Well, we—we take a lot of cash, you know, it’s hard to tell sometimes…”

“I think you know what happened,” Clint suggested. “Or is happening. C’mon, we did you a favor, _and_ we’re still gonna order doughnuts and coffee in a minute—just give us a straight answer.”

“You police?” Shreya asks.

Bobbi shakes her head and, after Clint gives her a prompting nod, pulls out her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge. No one needs to know she’s technically off active duty. “Like I said, there’s something happening here, and we’re trying to figure out what it is. You’re not in trouble—yet—especially not if you give us something to work with here.”

Shreya sighs heavily. “Two weeks ago, a boy comes in, maybe twelve or so. He orders two dozen assorted and a Box O’ Joe, and he pays with those bad bills. My husband tells him we can’t take that money, but then this boy, he…he _looks_ at him, just _looks_ at him, and then Kabir takes that money and lets him leave. I tried to ask him why, but all he says is that we have to, and he looked so scared that I didn’t ask again. Then the boy starts coming back every couple days—different times, different orders—and he pays the same way, and we take it. Okay? You tell your Captain America or whoever that that boy did something to my husband and that I told you what I knew. Okay?”

“Okay,” Clint says at the same time Bobbi starts to reply, “Captain America isn’t technically…” Shreya raises her eyebrows at both of them and they try again.

“What did the kid look like?” Bobbi asks, at the same time Clint goes, “Was anyone with this kid?”

Shreya looks increasingly less nervous at their overlapping patter. “Blond, skinny, preteen kid, like I said. Once or twice, he came in with a big man in a—a tracksuit, I think you call it? Red with yellow stripes. The man looked like he was maybe fifty or sixty. Dark hair, not like the boy. We don’t have security cameras, but…I—I know they spoke—something. I don’t know. You recognize the word ‘ _strakh_ ’? He said it many times, I remember that.”

This means nothing to Bobbi, but Clint nods eagerly. “It means ‘fear’ in Russian. And other Slavic languages, I think,” he explains, and they maybe have an actual lead to work off of. Clint turns back to Shreya. “Look, ma’am, like my partner here said, we don’t want to get you in any trouble. We’re trying to stop these guys and undo whatever they did to your husband and probably some other people in the neighborhood. Did the kid do anything to make Kabir want to keep using the fake money?”

“The second time, he said we could use it like real money. Very quiet, but I think he said that. But the big man was with him, so…it didn’t sound like ‘could,’ more ‘should.’” She licks her lips nervously and glances at the still-immobilized kid, who’s out of earshot and glaring at all of them. “May I call the police now, please?”

Bobbi nods. “Go ahead—just tell ‘em somebody else helped you and then beat it, okay? And we’ll probably come back tomorrow in case you remember anything else. Don’t worry, we’ll get this taken care of.”

“You were very helpful,” Clint adds, pulling a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. “Can we get a couple of jellies and large coffees to go?”

***

Back at the house, Clint brews iced tea while Bobbi calls in a favor or three from an old informant who works in private security. Once his data transfer comes through on her laptop, they spend the next few hours pouring over three weeks of surveillance footage from half a dozen different stores, including the liquor store from earlier.

There’s no sound, but the pattern that Shreya had described repeats itself at five of the six businesses—a scrawny teenage blond boy who, from one moment to the next, somehow scares into submission whoever rings up his relatively small, innocuous orders. The Slavic thugs—whom Clint had nicknamed the Tracksuit Draculas after one of them had shown up with a ring of red Slurpee dye around his mouth—are only sometimes present. The boy looks more nervous when they’re there, but it seems like whatever he’s doing to the cashiers is something he can do on his own.

“I don’t get it, though,” Clint complains. “He doesn’t _do_ anything to anybody. All he does is _look_ , and boom. And unless his handlers or whatever are glaring at people through the front windows or something where we can’t see…”

Bobbi massages her temples and grabs another fistful of potato chips. They’ve been over this conundrum repeatedly. Even after their respective experiences with alien technology and artifacts, they can’t make sense of what’s happening. Clint bangs his forehead against the table repeatedly, hard enough to jostle the nearest pile of spreadsheets.

Her phone buzzes with a calendar alert—Coulson has scheduled a check-in call with her a couple of days from now—and a thought occurs to Bobbi. She pulls up her contacts list and dials Mack, putting him on speakerphone so she won’t have to recap for or relay questions from Clint. “Hey, it’s me. Quick question.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on bed rest, Barbara?”

“You’re hilarious,” she retorts, crumpling the now-empty Ruffles bag extra-loudly before tossing it at the wastebasket and missing. “I kicked a mugger today, and I only had to ice afterwards for like five minutes.”

“Congratulations, you’ve re-achieved the martial arts skills of a ten-year-old with a purple belt. What’s the quick question?”

Clint raises an eyebrow and mouths, “Who are we talking to?”

Bobbi shakes her head. “You’re with Daisy doing that whole…thing, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Have you…met…anybody who can do stuff with their mind? Like, no touching, no waving hands or light shows or magic wands or whatever. Not, like, telekinesis, either, just looking at someone, or—or saying, I don’t know, some key phrase or something, and they make the person feel…a certain way…” She trails off, realizing she’s not totally sure what she’s trying to ask. At least not without explaining the whole damn case, which she really doesn’t have the jurisdiction to be investigating in the first place. But if there’s a suspected Inhuman involved, or any otherwise gifted individual…

“What do you mean, exactly?” Mack asks, sounding confused. “Oh, hang on.” There’s a short, muffled conversation, and then he returns. “Daisy says she doesn’t know about, uh, _looking_ , specifically, but they met an Asgardian a while back who could mind-control dudes just by speaking.” Another pause. “Only dudes, though. And there was an Inhuman who could, like…do something to control people after touching them, apparently. So…maybe? What are you doing over there, Bobbi? You’re on _leave_.”

“Oh, you know, some research, trying to keep up,” she says quickly, hoping he’ll recognize her dodge for what it is and let her explain in person whenever she’s finally in the field with him and the others again. “I’ll check back in in a few days. Tell Fitz I think I found a sandwich place that may have the world’s best aioli, if he wants to come try it sometime.”

She can almost see Mack’s frustration, but all he says is, “Will do. Take care of yourself.”

“You, too. Say hi to everybody for me. And tell Coulson to license me for the field again. I’m fine.”

He chuckles. “You got it, Bobbi.”

“Bye.”

Clint, who had gotten up at some point, tosses her a fresh bag of Fritos and sits back down, digging into his Funyuns. “Well, he’d better not be Asgardian, because I’ve had enough of their shit for a lifetime. What’s an Inhuman?”

“They’re like the gifted people S.H.I.E.L.D. used to track, but with an alien—uh, not Asgardian, I think they’re called Kree—booster shot instead of anything innate. More or less. But I’ve got a theory that maybe that’s what we’ve got here…”

“Care to expand on this theory?” he asks around a mouthful of artificial flavors and fried cornmeal.

“Yeah.” Bobbi sets her unopened Fritos aside and takes a gulp of tea. “I’m thinking this kid got exposed to the Terrigen mist stuff that activates Inhumans’ gifts. Superpowers. Whatever. His is that he can, like, generate fear in people, maybe? Or a little psychic suggestion, something like that. And somehow these Tracksuit Dracula guys found out he could do that and now they’re using him to make their plan work.”

“Is their plan to get a lot of free doughnuts and vodka and paper towels, though?” Clint leans forward and switches from eating to twirling his crossbow bolt again. “Your superpower theory’s right on, but I can’t see the endgame.”

She shrugs. “Dunno, but, frankly, it’s probably just one of a few illegal things that gang is doing. And we’ve got the evidence right here that they’re getting that much, anyway, and that the people they’re filtering the phony cash through could probably ID some of ‘em. If they weren’t creepily cowed into submission by a twelve-year-old. It’s not a complicated scheme, and, if I’m right, it’d probably fall apart pretty quickly if the kid weren’t in the picture. Or if there’s a way to, like, dampen his effects or something…”

Clint whistles. “That’s a solid theory. And if he _is_ Inhuman, or Asgardian, or otherwise otherworldly…that would definitely be in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s interest to investigate. Officially, I mean.”

“Or the Avengers,” she points out.

“Not technically on that team at the moment,” he reminds her. “Anyway, if you’re right, we shouldn’t need anything that showy for this, at least once we find out where they’re operating from. It’s a basic smash-and-grab: we get the kid out so S.H.I.E.L.D. can see to him, and then we hand everything else over to the appropriate law enforcement officials—aka, people who have not actually met the kid to be too scared to deal with the basic human criminal parts. I’ve been doing that kind of job since I was like eleven.”

“Eleven?” she blinks. “Where were you that you were committing larceny before you hit puberty?”

“I told you, the circus. You think those things make enough money to stay afloat on their own in this day and age?” He flips the bolt into the air and catches it in a continued spin.

“You were actually serious?”

“Oh, yeah, why would I make that up? Hell of an origin story, and I hate to waste the opportunity to see new people make that face you’re making now.”

Bobbi rolls her eyes. “It’s hard to tell with you. You’re awfully friendly for someone who still hasn’t explained why he’s here.” She pauses. “Not that you owe me your life story or anything, I’m just saying.”

“Secret agent life,” he shrugs. “You get into certain habits, right? And you never answered my question yesterday—about who you’re picturing when you beat the crap out of that bag.”

His meaning clicks after a moment of confusion. “Ex or enemy? Both, I guess. It’s not that long a story, it’s…I’m trying to move forward now, though, you know?”

“Sounds like there’s a story there to me,” Clint comments. “Tell you what, I can’t look at this evidence for another second. Any interest in hitting me?” He pockets the crossbow bolt and pours the crumbs from the now-empty bag of Funyuns into his mouth.

“A, that’s gross, man. B, you serious?”

He shrugs. “I got my own stuff brewing, too, frankly, and I could really do with some mindless punching right now. Picture whoever you want, if you need to.”

Bobbi can bring down men twice her size, but May’s the closest she’s come to testing her skills against an Avenger. May, like her, is S.H.I.E.L.D. born, bred, and trained—whereas everyone knows half of what makes people like Clint and his friends so powerful is their untraditional backgrounds. “You’re on. Hand-to-hand or weapons? I hear you’re handy with a stick yourself…oh, God, that sounded dirtier than I meant it.” She winces, wrinkling her nose as they wander across the foyer into the training room.

Clint hoots, and it sounds like it’s the first time he’s laughed—really, deeply laughed—in days. “Hands’re good for now, but I’m all for staves or something another time.” He toes off his sneakers and socks to match her already-bare feet; the jeans he’s got won’t give like her yoga pants will, but then again, Bobbi hasn’t met many men who kick and spin the way women in her line of work tend to.

She grins at that thought and, without warning, drives a side-kick at his chest with her good leg, putting her weight behind it to spare the bad one. The surprise on Clint’s face is evident, but he catches her heel and shoves it downward. As Bobbi’s upper body falls toward him, he drives a fist toward her chin. She gets her forearm up to block him, but landing on the bad leg ruins her balance, and she falls to the mat. He aims a punch downward. Bobbi manages to position her hands underneath her, steady enough to kick him in both shins, and he goes down, too.

While he’s flattened, Bobbi jackknifes back to standing. Clint catches her hand on her way up and uses her counterweight to pull himself up, too, instead of yanking her back down. She shakes off his grip and comes at him with a sharp elbow toward the gut. He leaps away from her reach and lands in a boxer’s shuffle, fists raised and eyes alight. Bobbi grins and takes aim.

Clint blocks her first two jabs easily, but he misses the upper cut to his sternum—which turns out to be a concession to give him the room to kick _her_ feet out from under her as he falls back from her punch. Bobbi pitches forward, fists flying again. He catches her left hook, and their joint momentum smacks Clint onto the mat again. Bobbi lands on top of him, unceremoniously knocking the wind out of him.

Neither of them moves for several seconds, and she takes a moment to steady her pulse. It’s been too long since she had any real, physical contact with another human being, and it feels something like relief. Beneath her, Clint inhales deeply, holding the rest of his body as still as a corpse. When their eyes meet, though, he quickly looks away, and whatever feeling had swept in passes.

“Way to live up to your rep, Mockingbird,” Clint quips. “But, uh, would you mind…?”

“Oh. Right, yeah,” she says, feeling silly. He’s married, and she’s injured. Bobbi rolls away and wobbles back to her feet. That leg’s going to need a lot of icing in a few minutes, she remembers with a wince. “Sorry.”

“Nah, it’s cool. I needed that. And lately everyone seems to be either amateur teens or, like, Norse gods, so…nice to have an actual fight.” He takes her offered hand and pulls himself back up. “In spite of that bum leg and...I think I saw a twitchy shoulder?”

“It’s almost healed—not a permanent thing,” she insists. “The enemy in question did a number on both.”

Clint recovers a couple of lukewarm water bottles from a shelf on the far wall and tosses one to her. “Hydra?”

“More or less.” Bobbi shudders involuntarily, feeling the shape of a slug in her shoulder and hearing that _Kara needs closure_ refrain again. “Spent a few months undercover with those bastards, still don’t understand ‘em. And this guy, Ward, turned out to be a special breed of sociopath, so: leg, shoulder, med leave.”

“And you dated before he fucked up your extremities?”

Bobbi feels her face twist into a reaction she hadn’t known her face could make. “Jesus, no. He was just your typical Hydra asshole. Gets off on making other people’s lives miserable, with or without Nazi sympathizers involved.”

Clint nods, and she recognizes the expression in his eyes. Too many S.H.I.E.L.D. agents had lost friends when Hydra had stepped out of the shadows, and many of those lost had been through betrayal, not death.

Bobbi knows the feeling, but she pushes her thoughts aside and adds, “The ex is…well, one of our agents at the moment, actually. Not a bad guy, but definitely kind of a dick on a regular basis.” He nods again, and she takes a chance and says, “Your turn, Hawkeye. Not that I don’t appreciate the help, or the company—because I definitely do—but what brings you to this particular mostly-forgotten safe house? I mean, besides the hankering for a decent sparring partner? I’m ready to go again, by the way, once I give this leg a break for a few minutes.”

His whole face changes, away from the adrenaline and to something sharp and sad. It passes almost as soon as she notices it, though, and he fixates his stare on his water bottle as he chugs the rest of it. All he says is, “I’m kind of in between gigs at the moment. Things weren’t…the best…at home, and I needed somewhere to crash, like I said, so I came here. Just until I figure out what’s next.”

It’s not really an answer and she says as much. Clint shrugs, seeming defeated, or at least deflated, despite the upbeat determination she’d begun to assume was his default. Bobbi sighs and hobbles over to the bench along the nearest wall to prop her leg up, and, after nearly of minute of silence, she says, “I get that whatever’s going on with you is none of my business, but…I don’t know, sometimes it helps to talk things out. Especially with a stranger who’s got little or no investment in any of it.”

This time, he looks at her. “Little or no investment? You wound me, Birdie.” But his knowing smile fades rapidly, and he sighs heavily. “Yeah, you know what, pour a couple of drinks in me and I may take you up on the offer. I think we passed a pub earlier, near that froyo place.”

“That sounds kinda perfect,” Bobbi says. “Let me change and grab some money. But no mocking my tolerance—I’ve been stuck here by myself for weeks, and drinking alone seemed too pathetic.”

“Awesome, I’m excited already.” He actually looks like he might be.

“Also: Birdie?” Bobbi wrinkles her nose.

Clint shrugs, but he’s smiling a little now. “’Mockingbird’ takes too long to say.”

***

The bar Clint had pointed out is crowded for a Tuesday. By the time they realize why, they’ve already ordered and successfully staked out a booth, so they agree to stay put and ignore the karaoke night happening around them. When their drinks come, he chugs the first third of his Guinness without pausing for breath, then digs into the pretzels on the table.

Bobbi snorts, “You have the grossest eating habits of any adult human I think I’ve ever met. Including my ex-husband, and he’s _English_ , so everything he likes is gross.”

“Ex- _husband_ , huh?” Clint asks, pushing the snack bowl back toward her and pulling out his crossbow bolt to toy with instead. “Figures. So what happened?”

Bobbi picks at the label on her Blue Moon. “Nothing that dramatic, honestly. Met in the field back when he was doing the merc thing, whirlwind courtship, got married in Vegas after like two weeks and before we’d had a single conversation about…well, anything real, it turned out. Spent about a year and a half trying to make it work while bickering about everything under the sun. Divorce papers were notarized a couple of months before your super-friends uncovered a seventy-year-old conspiracy and put all of our employment in question.”

He laughs at her characterization of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s nadir. “And they’re very sorry about that, trust me. So, why the angst now, if you’re already divorced? No offense, but it does kinda sound like you’ve known for a while it wasn’t…meant to be, or whatever.”

“Eh,” she says, sipping her drink. “I mean, yeah, but then he went and got himself hired by Coulson’s team. My team. And...I don’t know, it’d been just long enough to forget how infuriating he can be, and to start getting a little nostalgic. And horny.”

“Relapse, so to speak?” Clint reaches over the table and pulls the pretzels back toward him.

“Bingo. Only...turned out we still didn’t actually trust each other, not in the ways that matter. I’m not even sure how much I ever liked him as a person. He’s a hell of a field agent—we do _work_ really well together—but that’s not…well, I guess that’s part of why it took so long to untangle everything. Again.” Bobbi blows a raspberry and grabs a handful of pretzels. “And then the Hydra trash who fucked up my leg used me as bait—set a trap so Hunter would come to rescue me and trigger an automated sniper rifle in the process. I blocked the shot, so he was fine, but...” She pulls the collar of her shirt over to expose the still-puffy scar on her shoulder.

Clint winces. “So…last straw or restarting the cycle?”

“Last straw,” she says, as resolutely as she can. “Or at least…that’s what I want. I know that’s what I want, I _know_ it, and I know trying for anything else is just going to go to shit again. Only problem is making it stick this time. And the fact that he’s actually _part_ of S.H.I.E.L.D. now…it makes it hard to have any meaningful separation.”

“Well, that sucks,” Clint agrees. “Kind of the…opposite of my situation, actually.”

“Yeah?”

He shrugs dejectedly. “We met when I was with the Special Forces—she was a medic on base—and then, when S.H.I.E.L.D. came recruiting, I made keeping her and our family safe a condition of my employment. So she and the kids have been way out of harm’s way, thankfully—Loki didn’t touch them, and they weren’t in any of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s records to get info-dumped or scoped out by Hydra.”

Bobbi’s mind buzzes with the idea of _kids_ briefly, but she puts the thought aside. “So, what, you’ve been doing the long-distance thing with your family all this time?”

“Uh huh,” Clint nods. He sets his bolt onto the table, and Bobbi thinks it’s the first time she’s seen his fingers stop moving. “It was always…I was always so happy to be home. She’d be there waiting, and the kids…I almost never miss a birthday, y’know, or—or a soccer championship, or whatever. I rebuilt half of that house with my bare hands. I always called. I may not be around _physically_ all the time, but I wasn’t ever an absent _anything_.”

He pauses as the waiter swings by to drop off their shared baskets of chicken wings, fries, and the sad pile of vegetables that’s supposed to be a salad. Bobbi orders another round of drinks, at which Clint nods gratefully. She dumps a mound of ketchup onto her plate and starts going to town on the fries, adding around a mouthful, “You were saying?”

“Well, so, S.H.I.E.L.D. falls, and I’m kind of out of a job, right, but…well, you probably know, then there were all those months of, like, undermining Hydra and cleaning up the rest of Loki’s mess. So not that much changed, actually, until the whole Ultron shitshow was over. And then I…went home. We were fine on money, there’s the new baby—well, new-ish, at this point—and it seemed like everything had kind of lined up kinda perfectly to be a whole little family for once.”

She cocks her head as he pauses to dig into the wings and thank the waiter for their new beers. “So, if my issue is not enough separation, that makes yours…too much?” He nods. “Then what?”

“Well…then things were good for a while, and we hit the point where I’d been home longer than pretty much ever before. And then we both started realizing…like, it was so awesome to be with the kids indefinitely, but she and I…it was like the chickens finally came home to roost. The chickens being the toll of having a long-distance marriage for the last decade and change,” he says, examining the wing in his hand a little mournfully before taking another bite. “Like, we’d been leading these separate lives for so long that, in spite of everything, we didn’t really know how to lead one _together_ anymore. I’m not even sure if we ever did.”

“Wow, that…that really sucks. I’m so sorry,” Bobbi says, covering his free hand on the table with her own in what she hopes is a comforting gesture. His thumb shifts over hers in apparent acceptance. “Are your kids…?”

“They’re little enough that it’s still great with them, yeah,” he nods. “It’s just…there’s not really anyone I can talk to, ‘cause, I don’t know. I don’t really want relationship advice from Captain America, and Nat’s kind of too close to the situation…and everybody else I know has no idea my family even exists. So…yeah. I don’t know if I have a marriage anymore, to be honest, and I can’t…” His voice breaks off.

Her hand is still on top of his, and she can see the weight of that admission stunning him even as he says it; maybe it’s the first time he’s admitted it aloud. “I’m so sorry,” she says again. “I—I know that feeling. The loss and the possibility, and no idea if there’s any finality to it…”

Clint swallows thickly and takes another gulp of his beer. “Yeah, that’s exactly the feeling. And we can’t go back…but neither of us know what going forward’s gonna look like now. That’s why I came here—we both figured a little time apart to reset might help.”

“And?” Bobbi withdraws her hand and samples the salad, which isn’t quite as bad as it looks. “I mean, I guess it’s only been a couple of days here, but…”

“The distraction’s been nice,” he affirms with a wry half-smile. “Couldn’t have stumbled onto better company. But I don’t know that that’s enough for the long term.”

“Well, that’s a shitty reason to be taking a vacation,” she agrees. “Though if it’s not too insensitive to say…I’m glad you came here.”

He smiles more fully at that and raises his nearly empty beer to her. “Cheers, Birdie.”

The nickname—and probably the two beers she’s polished off—makes her blush briefly, and she changes tactics as they toast each other. “Okay, no more bird squad pity party here. What are we gonna do for karaoke?”

Clint draws himself upright and gives her a look. “I am an _Avenger_. I do not karaoke.”

“ _Former_ Avenger, if I recall correctly, and we are totally doing karaoke,” she decides, rising and walking toward the DJ booth to put in a request. She hears him call after her, “Fine, but no love songs! And no Journey!”

They’ve finished off the food and another pair of beers by the time the emcee summons them onstage. “Oh, god, what did you tell him?” Clint moans, dragging his feet as Bobbi bounds onstage to start singing the intro, hoping enthusiasm will make up for her borderline tone-deaf voice. The multiple beers are starting to hit, and she’s more nervous about cheering up Clint than sounding good anyway. But he perks up noticeably as he recognizes the opening lyrics.

“ _I'm your only friend, I'm not your only friend, but I'm a little glowing friend, but really I'm not actually your friend, but I am…_ ”

He grabs the second microphone just in time to beat her to singing the first chorus: “ _Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch, who watches over you, make a little birdhouse in your soul…_ ”

“ _Not to put too fine a point on it, say I'm the only bee in your bonnet_ ,” she rejoins, and they duet neatly on the next line, “ _Make a little birdhouse in your soul_.”

Their audience whoops encouragingly in the space before the first verse, which they trade back and forth as if they’d rehearsed the whole thing, or at least as if they had discussed the song selection beforehand. They spend the second chorus half-shouting—his falsetto is almost as bad as her off-key singing—and switch off again during the next part.

When the instrumental bridge plays, the crowd cheers again, and Clint takes it as a cue to sweep Bobbi into some kind of makeshift square dance for a few breathless seconds. They pick up on the fade-out, with Bobbi breathlessly singing the lead vocals and Clint carrying the backup, before coming together for the final, “ _Make a little birdhouse in your soul…_ ”

There’s more cheering, and Bobbi is fairly certain someone yells, “Kiss her!” as they take their bows. If Clint hears it, though, he doesn’t react. Instead, he slings an arm around her shoulder and steers her back to their table, and the whole thing feels more natural than it should with someone she’s known for all of a couple of days. “Thanks,” he shouts in her ear, as the bar fills with cheers for the next karaoke act. “That was great.”

Panting and grinning, they find that the waiter has cleared their empties and left behind pint glasses filled with water. Without a word, they sit down, clink their glasses together, chug down the water, and order another round.

***

Bobbi wakes up aching again, but this time it’s her head, rather than her leg, although that’s sore, too. Groaning, she fumbles her way to the kitchen in search of aspirin, water, and anything that might be construed as a hangover remedy. She finds the first two quickly, as well as Clint, who’s already shoveling oatmeal into his mouth. The room smells like he’s brewing coffee, too. Bobbi squints at him, “Are you somehow _not_ hungover? I swear to God, Barton, if you were drinking me under the table…”

He holds up his hands in surrender, though he’s still chewing as he says, “I would never! I’ve just gone drinking enough times with Tony Stark and certain other people who physically _can’t_ get drunk to be able to kinda tolerate…however much we had last night.”

The coffeemaker beeps, and Bobbi resists the urge to start drinking straight from the pot long enough to pull out and fill a pair of mugs. “That oatmeal smells amazing.”

“There’s more in the microwave. Hit the start button,” Clint grins, returning to his own bowl.

Bobbi heats up her breakfast and digs in. “God bless you, Clinton Francis.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, because you’re probably not going to like my brilliant idea for the morning,” he admits, sipping his coffee. “Remember you’d mentioned sparring with weapons yesterday?”

“Ugh, yes,” she says. “But that’s probably a good idea, honestly, sweating it out. Just give me a few minutes to digest and maybe wake up a little…”

Half an hour later, they’re both wearing workout clothes and stretching in the training room; Bobbi has her practice eskrima sticks at the ready, and Clint is warming up with a staff he’d dug out of the weapons locker. She lets him start the fight this time—he counts down from three—and they begin.

Clint whips his pole at her upper body. Bobbi raises her right baton up to block it, using the left one to hit the outside of his leg. He manages to move the staff fast enough to block her next blow to his face while jumping away from her follow-up swing at his other knee. He pitches forward to block her next move, and she jumps back to dodge his. They settle into a rapid exchange of blows from different angles, the wood of their weapons clacking together in a steady rhythm.

He’s a good sparring partner and a nice match for her technique and speed. Bobbi is still moving a little slowly after so much time injured and away from the field, and Clint balances his maneuvers to allow her to get a real workout without straining herself. It’s a solid practice fight, rather than a no-holds-barred battle, and it’s exactly what she needs to feel more like herself, following both the previous night’s drinking and the weeks and months she’s spent recovering from her injuries.

After a few minutes of trading blows, Bobbi speeds up enough to send Clint’s weapon flying, making him grin in admiration. She tosses his staff back, and, when they resume their rhythm, says, “You know, we could make the next part of this pretty easy.”

“The next part of what?” he asks, nearly letting her swipe his temple.

She falls back to let him recover momentarily, bouncing on the balls of her feet and flipping her batons around in a half-twirl. “The case, remember, sport?”

“Right. Yes. What are we doing?”

“We’re gonna let them come to us,” Bobbi explains as the sparring picks up again. “We know what the tracksuit guys look like, so we make the rounds to each of the sites until we find ‘em. Then we either tail them back to wherever they’re keeping the kid, or we gently beat it out of someone. Might be a little more violent than actual detective work, but we’re off-book anyway, and it’ll be faster. Once we’ve got the kid out, hopefully we can find a way to undo his mojo and let the feds or whoever deal with the rest of this. Smash and grab, like you said.”

Clint twists his staff, hard, sending one of her batons flying, but she smacks his hand with the other to disarm him in turn. He wipes sweat off of his forehead with the hem of his shirt. “Sounds like a plan, Birdie.”

***

They find two Tracksuit Draculas in the early afternoon, leaving a payday-lending center that Bobbi had started to suspect as a possible front for their operation. She recognizes one of them from the black eye she’d given him two nights earlier; the other looks about ten years younger but is familiar from the security tapes. Both seem to recognize her after a couple of seconds, which is enough time for Clint to make himself scarce. She can see the bulge of a gun sticking out of the first bruiser’s waistband, but, unlike at the Chinese restaurant, she’s more than ready to deal with them on her terms.

It’s a risk, in broad daylight on a medium-trafficked street corner, but she’s tired of waiting, and their plan had been—in Clint’s words—to wing it once they found their targets. So Bobbi surges forward, kicking the definitely-armed guy with a roundhouse aimed at prying the gun away from him in one move. She strikes the other in the back and knees with her batons. Both fall like Jenga towers, uneven and heavy, giving Bobbi time to kick up the loose gun and catch it. Luckily, the safety is on.

The two men clamber back to standing. Before they can come at Bobbi, an arrow flies seemingly out of thin air and hits a grassy crack in the sidewalk between one of the men’s feet. It smokes slightly, complete with a hissing noise, and while Bobbi’s pretty sure it’s one of the trick arrows Clint had shown her earlier, the effect is enough to make the thugs uneasy. The one Bobbi hadn’t disarmed points a gun at her, but the other is distracted, gaze darting up and down the street in attempt to figure out where or whom it had come from. It’s hard to tell whether he’s successful or not before a second arrow flies into his throat—although its wide, flat tip works to shock rather than kill him.

Bobbi points her new piece at the still-standing Dracula with a humorless grin that she’d refined on Hydra underlings a year earlier. “So, are you gonna answer my questions, or is my friend gonna have to start wasting perfectly good steel-tipped arrows on your sorry skin?”

He gulps audibly, gun still trained on her, and he glances at his stunned friend on the ground. Bobbi raises an eyebrow and flips off the safety. The man groans and sets his gun down. “Vat you vant, _divka_?”

“Where’s the boy?”

He rolls his eyes. “Who?”

“Don’t futz with me, bro. You really want to do this?”

“ _Suka_!” he spits, and makes a run for it.

They’re still in public, so Bobbi bolts after him instead of firing the gun. Less than five minutes later, he’s ducked through traffic, and, when she returns to the payday lender’s doorstep, his friend is still out cold. She curses, but then her phone buzzes with a text from Clint; all it says is, “Got him.”

Before she can contemplate possible meanings, Clint himself appears in front of her, looking almost smug. “Tracked him to a flophouse about a mile from here. Told you I’d see better from high up.”

Bobbi places her hand over her heart and vows, “I will never doubt again. Where to?”

***

After a quick circuit to make sure the house Clint had found is sufficiently vulnerable, they simply walk in the front door and start hitting. As far as plans go, it’s rudimentary but surprisingly effective. There are almost a dozen men, all wearing awful velour tracksuits and ranging in age from twenty- to sixty-something. None of them is a match for two codename-level S.H.I.E.L.D. agents individually, let alone together.

Bobbi can feel her still-healing muscles protest as she moves, but she doesn’t care. Adrenaline and endorphins surge through her, and that energy is all she needs to fly into her element. She barely has to think coherent thoughts as her body moves the way it’s meant to—striking a bad guy in his jaw with one baton, kneeing another in the groin, smashing heads against furniture, flying across the room like the bird she’s named for. It’s exhilarating, and long overdue. When she pauses for breath, surrounded by five men too injured or too unconscious to fight back, she gets a glimpse of Clint in action.

It’s too close-range to use his bow for archery, but he employs it like a staff, whacking heads and deflecting limbs with practiced ease and obvious determination. He tosses it from hand to hand, depending on where his attackers come at him. Clint is a more than adept boxer, it turns out, and he hits as hard barehanded as he does with the bow. It’s not the kind of fighting he’s known for—the old-school sniper with a predator’s focus—but it’s a sight to see, almost made more beautiful by the knowledge that hand-to-hand isn’t even his forte.

In the corner of Bobbi’s vision, one of her downed targets starts to stir. She slams the length of her eskrima stick into his abdomen and spins a crescent kick into the skull of the last Dracula standing. Clint knocks the guy’s feet out from under him, and he lands as painfully and gracelessly as the others. They spend a couple of minutes ensuring that no one is dead or in need of immediate medical attention and hog-tie all of them for the feds to find later. 

The house itself isn’t anything special: a basic two-story clapboard in a bad neighborhood, so it doesn’t take long to sweep the first floor for traps, additional goons, or the boy. Finding none of the above, they move upstairs, where there are two empty bedrooms—one being used as an armory, the other as some kind of office with stacks of presumably counterfeit bills below the window—a bathroom, and a locked door. If anyone is behind the door, there’s no way they could have missed the commotion downstairs, so Bobbi takes the silence as a good sign. Just in case, Clint knocks, and they both jump away from the door, but nothing happens. After a couple of minutes, he says, “Okay, we’re coming in,” and Bobbi jimmies the door off its hinges.

Inside, they find a child’s bedroom—sparse but comfortable, and clearly meant for the familiar-looking blond twelve-year-old doing a poor job of hiding under his bed. Bobbi holsters her weapons and lies down on the floor so she’s at face level with the kid. “Hey, you all right in there? We’re here to help, okay?”

Wide-eyed, he waits a few seconds as if to see whether she means it or not before taking her proffered hand and scooting out from under the bed. He leans against the box spring, curled into a fetal position, and Clint crouches down to join Bobbi. “I’m Clint; this is Bobbi,” he says. “We’re gonna get you out of here, if you want. And thank you for not scaring us away now. What’s your name, kid?”

The boy peers over his knees at them. “Al—Alex. Alexander Aaron. What—what happened to the, um, _titushkos_? They said no one could get in, and—and I don’t have parents who’d come, or—or—”

“They can’t hurt you anymore,” Bobbi assures him. “They can’t make you scare people like they’ve been doing.” There’s a brief moment where she’s worried that they’ve misjudged the situation entirely—that the boy is somehow willingly complicit in his captors’ crimes, or that he’s actually _that_ persuasive—but relief sweeps over his features instead. “Have you heard of S.H.I.E.L.D.?” she adds. “That’s who I work for. They’re gonna make sure you get somewhere safe.”

“How—how did you know that—that they were making me…?” Alex asks, trailing off. “And what’s S.H.I.E.L.D.?”

“It’s our job to know,” Clint says. “As for S.H.I.E.L.D.—look, you know about the Avengers?”

Alex’s face brightens at that. “Like Captain America?”

Clint smiles. “Yeah, like Captain America. S.H.I.E.L.D. is a group that helps the Avengers keep people safe. So that’s our job, finding people who need help and helping them. And they’ll make sure that if you use your powers in the future, that it’s because _you_ want to. How does that sound?”

The boy nods and lets Clint help him into standing. In spite of his recent experiences, he’s young and trusting enough to simply take them at their word. It’s a rare quality in anyone Bobbi’s interacted with through S.H.I.E.L.D., and she’s more than a little pained at the thought of his innocence being distorted into hurting people to further the Tracksuit Draculas’ minor criminal enterprises. Similar emotions play out on Clint’s face.

They help Alex load his meager possessions into a backpack and escort him out of the house. Bobbi finally makes the long-overdue calls to Coulson and the feds about the case while Clint summons an Uber.

While they wait for their ride and the authorities to show up, Alex examines Clint’s bow with reverence and goes wide-eyed when Bobbi shows him a picture on her phone of Hawkeye in full uniform, flanking the better-known Avengers.  “How come you aren’t in the picture?” he asks Bobbi quietly.

“That’s a great question,” Clint replies.

***

Bobbi steps out of her bedroom after a well-earned shower to find Clint showing Alex some basic punches in the training room. The kid is barely pubescent, but his form is good, and if he does turn out to be Inhuman or otherwise gifted, there’s a good chance he could follow in Daisy’s footsteps. She watches Clint, kind but not condescending, guide him through a couple of basic drills, and she thinks, despite everything, that he must be a wonderful father when he has the chance.

Clint spots her and feigns distraction, allowing Alex to sock him in the bicep, which makes the boy smile proudly. “Feeling more human, Birdie?”

“Yup,” she says. “Did I miss anything?”

He nods and gestures for Alex to help himself to a water bottle. “Yeah, Coulson called. Hope you don’t mind that I took it—you left your phone in the foyer with your gear. It was nice to actually talk to him, anyway. Been a while.”

“Nah, that’s fine. What’d he say?”

“He was kinda pissed that we’d done this whole operation without telling him, obviously,” Clint shrugs. “But glad it worked out. I told him I’d get your whole paper trail and the security footage over to the feds tomorrow, and he’s sending someone to come get you and Alex in a few hours.”

Bobbi freezes and stares at him. “A few _hours_? Both of us?”

He shrugs again. “I told Phil you were more than ready to be back in the field. That’s…that’s what you wanted, right?”

“Yeah, I—yeah, it was. Is. Okay, guess I better go pack,” she says, half to herself. “Um, thanks. For the vote of confidence, I mean.”

“Anytime, Birdie,” he says, meaning it. “You’re a damn good agent, and S.H.I.E.L.D. shouldn’t be letting you waste away while tracking down Ukrainian bullies with what turned out to unpronounceable names.”

“As far as Slavic monikers go, ‘Ivan Banionis’ wasn’t that hard,” she points out. “But…yeah. Thank you. I should…go get my stuff together.”

She can feel his eyes on her as she returns to her room to pack, and she thinks maybe she isn’t the only one unsure how to feel about the abrupt departure.

***

By the time an unmarked but unmistakably S.H.I.E.L.D.-owned SUV rumbles up to the house, Bobbi’s bags are waiting alongside Alex’s by the door, and he and Clint have moved on to blocks and dodges while Bobbi ices her leg. All three of them watch through the window in the foyer as Daisy and Fitz climb out of car and approach the house.

Bobbi hugs both of the younger agents hello, honestly surprised by how happy she is to see them, and performs quick introductions. They both seem relatively nonplussed by Clint and turn to focus on Alex, who gets a warm greeting from Daisy and a short series of polite questions about his abilities from Fitz.  It’s quickly apparent that they won’t need to take any special precautions in transporting him back to the new base of operations, fortunately, and they start to gather his things.

“Okay, I think we’re all set to go!” Daisy says. “Alex, you wanna ride shotgun? We’ll make Fitz sit in the back. Bobbi, let me grab one of those bags.”

She nods. “Sure, thanks, Daisy. Just…give me one sec, okay? I’ll meet you out there.”

Daisy shrugs genially, and Bobbi can’t tell if the younger woman has picked up on any particular vibe or not. “Take your time, do whatever you gotta do.” She leads Fitz and Alex out to the street, and Bobbi turns to Clint.

“So, um…I guess this is goodbye?” Clint asks. “You gonna be okay?”

She gives him a look. “You know, Barton, I managed perfectly fine for years before you came along.”

“Fair enough,” he chuckles. “Still. Take care of yourself, Bobbi.”

She doesn’t miss his use of her name instead of the nickname he’d bestowed on her—had that really only been yesterday? “You could come, you know. I mean, maybe not right this second but—you said you liked being a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. We’re still here, minus the evil infiltrators…and you could come back. Coulson would take you in a heartbeat.”

“I’ve thought about it,” he admits. “And it’s tempting, really tempting, but I…I gotta figure out stuff at home first, you know? Get my own…whatever…straightened out before I get back to saving the rest of the world full-time. But, uh, when that’s, you know, done…I’ll let you know. I’d—it’d be great to work with you again.”

“Yeah, no, that’s good,” Bobbi nods, a little too quickly. “That makes sense. I hope you guys can work it out, I really do.”

The same existential sadness from their earlier conversations passes over his face again. He hides it better this time, but she recognizes it anyway. “Thanks,” he murmurs. “And I—I hope you get the closure you want.”

“Thanks, Clint.” She moves to hug him, but they both misjudge the angle. They’re the same height, so their cheeks brush, narrowly avoiding a kiss that she thinks would have probably been unintended but not unwelcome. Instead, their foreheads rest against each other for a few long moments, as they breathe in each other’s exhales in lieu of saying anything more.

Outside, Daisy honks the car horn, and Bobbi and Clint both jerk back to reality. He gives her a quick hug, she pecks him on the cheek, and that’s that.

***

Late that night, Bobbi is unpacking in her old berth at S.H.I.E.L.D.’s current headquarters, and something sharp pokes her palm, nearly drawing blood. She discovers what turns out to be a full-size arrow at the bottom of her bag. It’s a gorgeous piece of weaponry—lightweight, with a black carbon fiber shaft and dark purple fletching. The point is tipped in steel that shines a deep shade of blue.

She holds the arrow between her fingers and gives it whirl. It’s longer and lighter than her eskrima sticks, but she enjoys the feel of in her hand. After a few spins, she notices a bright yellow sticky note that must have fallen off of it. In lieu of signature, there’s a little hand-drawn picture of a bullseye target.

Above the doodle, in smudged scrawl, it reads, _Birdie—Something new for you to try twirling_.

**Author's Note:**

> In addition to providing inspiration for the overall piece, the musical _[Once](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_\(film\))_ also gets credit for this fic's title, which is from the song "[Gold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXCSdpJVe7I)."
> 
> [Alexander Aaron](http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Alexander_Aaron_\(Earth-616\)), also known as Phobos, is a member of the Secret Warriors team in the 616 comics universe.
> 
> I do not own Bobbi and Clint's karaoke song, "[Birdhouse in Your Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjSzjoU7OQ)" by They Might Be Giants, nor any of the other characters you recognize.
> 
> I probably sound like a broken record given the frequency I thank [ilostmyshoe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe) and [red_b_rackham](http://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham) for their stellar and dedicated beta-reading, but they a) deserve every superlative in the book and b) managed to outdo themselves this go-round.
> 
> And thank you to [paynesgrey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paynesgrey/pseuds/paynesgrey) and [flipflop_diva](http://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/pseuds/flipflop_diva) for their [spectacular](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5056363) [artwork](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5077474)! Go give them all the kudos, please.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Fanart - If a Door Be Closed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5056363) by [paynesgrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paynesgrey/pseuds/paynesgrey)




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